Dear Friends of John ~
Jim Douglass' Opus, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Martin, Malcolm, and RFK is being released today.
Ed Curtin's review is a soaring paen. Please share far and wide.
It is commonly known that John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated long ago; but it is the intricacies of their personal and political tales, how they dealt with betrayals, threats, and lies, and how their lives and missions intersected, where the meaning manifests itself. The facts are essential, but they are lumps of inert clay until the spirit moves them. These men, despite all their frailties, were moved by the spirit of compassion for others; they were men for others despite the risks to themselves. If this sounds too gushy to you, it could be because you are confusing them with most public figures whose primary concern is power, prestige, and self-survival at all costs.
Douglass’s genius is to cut to the heart of the matter – to find redemptive meaning in the great mishmash of facts and awaken this compassionate spirit in the reader, just as his subjects had to discover it in the circumstances into which life had tossed them. Just as we do. Life is always what comes next.
Douglass grasps the prophet and artist’s secret that we all live by stories, and the martyred heroes’ tales he recounts in this book are sorely needed in this darkest of times when the death of our planet is at stake and the spiritual sustenance to prevent it is desperately needed.
For Mother Earth, ALL her children, and ALL that follows us here,
Dave Ratcliffe
Assistant Director
Museum of Hidden History
